Theresa May: Good riddance
The U.K.'s long national nightmare is finally over. Prime Minister Theresa May is finally getting out. But not without dragging it out, which is what she does. CNN reports:
UK Prime Minister Theresa May finally gave in to the intense political pressure over her failure to secure Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, announcing her resignation in an emotional address to the nation on Friday.
Standing at a lectern in Downing Street, May said she deeply regretted not being able to deliver Brexit, the issue that brought her to power in 2016 and which consumed her premiership in the three years since.
May said she would quit as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7, but would stay on as Prime Minister until a successor is chosen. That process will be completed by the end of July, her party said.
She was pictured weeping about it, which can only provoke scorn given that she doesn't see herself at fault. But she is, because the hard fact remains, she was an utterly miserable failure, leaving Britain in awful shape as the European Union continues to lord over it and Brexit still amounts to something that never happened. The voters wanted it, and recent reports suggest that they are digging in harder than ever. But from May all they ever got was delay, delay, delay and calls for more time. Like, why?
Maybe the fact that she was against Brexit and promised to get Brexit done anyway if she could just be prime minister over some worthier candidates was the problem. Her whole premise was wrong and putting her in that position (and not by popular vote), right after the stunning result of the Brexit vote, to get Britain out, was a recipe for failure. A revolution was ignited with Brexit - and the feckless Tories put the equivalent of a NeverTrump in the top leadership position to helm the ship outward. It's like they believed the Brits were crazy for voting to leave the European Union and therefore in need of "proper control."
They didn't get it. What's worse, May didn't get out soon enough. She was one of the shortest-tenured prime ministers in U.K. history (sixth shortest) and yet her wretched government seemed like it went on for an eternity.
Did she achieve Brexit? Nope, she kept wanting to please the eurotrash back in Brussels. Did she threaten to walk out on them? Not in any serious way - it raised suspicions that she secretly liked them, because she was so bad at this. A clean break with the European Union would have been a preferable thing to what she had on offer and Britain could have bounced right back on the trade front by now -- with Donald Trump in the wings offering Britain a "first in line" free trade deal, and the old empire nations that would have loved to sign a free trade deal with Britain to make up for any lost trade with the continent. Never happened because May was always enmired with Brussels, and it should have been done a long time ago.
There are a lot of other things about her that were utterly awful. One, on her watch, the British parliament never spent much time at all debating about Brexit - it was just too embarrassing, too Nigel Farage-y. They opted to talk about leftwing stuff. Horrible things such as the arrest of Tommy Robinson, the refusal to permit radio host Michael Savage to enter the country, and the Charlie Gard killing happened on her miserable watch.
And what did May do outside Brexit? Just leftwing stuff, almost like she was a non-lunatic left Labourite ruling the place. Here is BBC's list:
Non-Brexit achievements Mrs May would point to include forcing companies with more than 250 employees to reveal the average pay of men and women, increasing the NHS budget by £20.5bn a year by 2023 - a real-terms average increase of 3.4% a year - and a 25-year environment plan that will see the sale of diesel cars and petrol cars phased out by 2040.
She also scrapped the 1% freeze on public sector pay, brought in a cap on energy bills and introduced house building targets, including more affordable homes.
But, despite pledges, she has failed to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands she promised and a much-delayed social care green paper has still not been published.
Every last one of these things - raising bureaucrat pay, enacting global warming measures, raising taxes, letting migrants in - is something leftwingers like. There was one other thing not named by the BBC - the growing evidence of her government's complicity in spying on Donald Trump through the Russian collusion lie. All you can conclude from this record is that May was a leftist in conservative clothing.
Back in the old days, British prime ministers who screwed up got out. Fast. May should have resigned immediately after her utterly stupid call to snap elections - which lost her her parliamentary majority in 2017. Did she get a clue from that? Nope, she clung to power - the way corrupt Democratic presidents and their corrupt cabinet members hold on. Apparently, the honor of resigning was gone after the Clinton era, almost in an imitation of U.S. politics. But the BBC chart does note that cabinet members resigned precipitously in her administration, almost as if to compensate for her refusal to do so. Why didn't she resign two years ago? As a result of her mindless clinging, her Tory Party, the great party of Benjamin Disraeli and Margaret Thatcher, is in ruins.
Will Boris Johnson, the current favorite and the guy who should have replaced May at the beginning be an improvement? It's likely he would be better but not exactly a guarantee - he still mouths nonsense about global warming, so he might just repeat the same mistakes as May did. But he would probably be better.
The BBC of all places has an excellent graphic presentation from its Visual Journalism Team on why May was such a miserable failure. Read this and the only thing you can wonder is why she wasn't thrown out years ago.
Image credit: Tiocfaidh ár lá 1916 via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0